Indeed, it's a lovely place. People that visit for the specific intention of being needlessly unpleasant are blocked off, so generally it's all about the games. It is a shame that human nature means people do try to be less that civil sometimes, making moderation necessary, but it fits fairly well with the Miiverse per game design.

Of course there are times where people do go off-topic, like all the Willem Defoe stuff, but it's not harmful and people don't seem to mind just rolling with it

I find it's always good to be able to ask a question, if I get stuck in Super Metroid or something a quick post to ask for help. Then I can carry on and try and figure it out, if not within a few minutes someone has generally posted an answer. It's quicker than looking up an FAQ.

It's easier to post screenshots directly on Miiverse for some things, if it's a puzzle you need help for which is made easier to share by having the screenshot right there. Plus I don't always have my phone beside me, and Miiverse is responsive enough (now, at least).

Granted, there are certainly times where it's easier to have your phone ready, like if there's a checklist you're working down and completing stage by stage, but there are things that Miiverse is better for.

The guy who is spamming the MiiVerse for friends (who I stupidly added to my friends list) strangely according to his status in my 'Friends List' was "Last online over a month ago." Is it possible to video chat in MiiVerse using a PC or mobile device other than the Gamepad?

Shinen are a clever bunch of guys - only 5 of them I think - but they do seem to like the wii u architecture for whatever reason. They are a modest bunch - they reckon they don't deserve the praise they got for the graphics in nano assault neo, simply because they did hardly any deep diving or optimising of the game as the hardware ran the game well enough without having to do these things.

They do get a bit of flack now and again but their opinions are mostly solid. They think that games are pretty much hitting the point where they look good enough. They feel it's not really better looking games that's needed, but better games full stop. Controversial given that EG gave Nano Assualt Neo 4/10 although to be fair, that was the lowest score by far and the metascore is up in the 70's.

To the best of my knowledge they don't use any middleware and code directly to the machine - it's fair to say they are a talented bunch and certainly a knowledgeable bunch.

So given that background, they talk a little about the 32mb of edram in the wii u - and how it's going to be useful for 1080p rendering using the framebuffers.

Try to be nice, I do find snippets like this interesting when teased out like this - not just for wii u - but for all the gaming tech. Stuff like this seems to bring the worst out in people when it comes to the wii u but I'm just trying to share some interesting snippets of info.

Wii U eDRAM usage is comparable to the eDRAM in the XBOX360, but on Wii U you have enough eDRAM to use it for 1080p rendering.

In comparison, on XBOX360 you usually had to render in sub 720p resolutions or in mutliple passes. Even if you don’t use MSAA (MultiSample Anti-Aliasing) you already need around 16Mb just for a 1080p framebuffer (with double buffering). You simply don’t have that with XBOX360 eDRAM. As far as I know Microsoft corrected that issue and put also 32MB of Fast Ram into their new console.

We use the eDRAM in the Wii U for the actual framebuffers, intermediate framebuffer captures, as a fast scratch memory for some CPU intense work and for other GPU memory writes. Using eDRAM properly is a simple way to get extra performance without any other optimizations. In general, development for Wii U CPU+GPU is simple. You don’t need complicated setups or workarounds for things like HDR(High Dynamic Range)or linear RGB (Color Modeling). What we also like is that there are plenty of possibilities for speeding up your rendering and code, but you don’t have to dig deep for them to get proper performance.

For instance, all of our shaders used in ‘Nano Assault Neo’ are not really optimized. We just used the first iteration of them because they were already fast enough. We looked later through the shaders dis-assembly and noticed we can make them 30-40% faster by better pipeline usage or better hints for the shader compiler.

As ‘Nano Assault Neo’ never had a problem running at 60fps (including a 2nd screen rendering at 60fps on the GamePad) we didn’t have to do that kind of optimizations back then. For CPU usage ‘Nano Assault Neo’ only used the main CPU core. The two other cores were almost idle, beside a few percent used for our audio thread.

So all in all ‘Nano Assault Neo’ only used a fraction of the currently available resources on Wii U and looks and plays quite nice. And for the future, don’t forget that in many consoles, early in their life cycle, not all resources were already useable or accessible via the SDK (Software Development Kit). So we are sure the best is yet to come for Wii U.’